One of the things that is important for developing a high availability or disaster recovery is knowing what commitments you need to honor for your clients. After all, if you don't know how quickly you need to be back up, or what protections for data are required, how can you plan to recover systems?

Yes, I know everyone always wants 100% uptime and 100% data recovery, but those things are very expensive, and sometimes not possible on you systems, so doesn't it make sense to have some idea of the relative importance of data in each system?

For this Friday, I wanted to ask the DBAs out there about the contracts that should exist between the technology infrastructure and Its business clients. The question this week is:

Do you know what your SLA is?

Do you actually have a written contract for various systems with the clients that spells out specifically the acceptable uptime and data loss parameters? If so, do you know what those numbers are?

You do need to have some idea of what is acceptable, even if it's not a guarantee in a contract. It's necessary in order to efficiently plan what level of resources will be devoted to your systems. Without this, you might be making investments on the wrong systems, leaving those systems that are more important from the business perspective, exposed to more data loss than can be tolerated.

Steve Jones

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